Interactions Between Social and Biological Thinking: The Case of Lamarck

Gissis, Snait B.

doi:10.1162/posc.2009.17.3.237

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Though some historians have questioned Lamarck's religious commitment [17,18,28], he began his book with a statement that is similar to the viewpoint of Saint Augustine: "Assuredly, nothing can exist but by the will of the Supreme Author, but can we venture to assign rules to him in the execution of his will? May not his infinite power have chosen to create an order of things which should evolve in succession all that we know as well as all that we do not know?"…”

Section: Jean Baptiste De Monet Lamarckmentioning

confidence: 99%

19th Century Evolutionary Thought Before Charles Darwin

Flannelly¹

2017

Religious Beliefs, Evolutionary Psychiatry, and Mental Health in America

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The chapter describes ideas that undermined and fostered the concept of organic evolution during the first half of the 19th Century. The prevailing Western view about nature at the beginning of the 19th Century was expressed in Reverend William Paley's popular 1802 book, Natural Theology. The book was based on the idea that animals are so well suited to the environment in which they live that they must be the result of a Divine plan, and it presented the often repeated analogy that the parts of the body are like the parts of a watch, which are so complicated and inter-related that they must be the product of an "intelligent and designing Creator." By 1809, however, the French zoologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who is recognized as the founder of evolutionary theory, published his Philosophie Zoologique, which claimed that forces of nature, not the direct hand of God, had molded plants and animals to adapt them to the worlds in which they live. As the chapter explains, Lamarck offered two theories of what he called, transformism, which changed generations of animals over vast amounts of time from one form of animal into another form. Although Lamarck's theories were never widely accepted, Philosophie Zoologique was the best argument at that time for organic evolution, and it even traced the evolution of modern animals from a common ancestor. Despite the rejection of Lamarck's theories, his book seemed to spur others to develop theories of evolution that culminated in Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. Keywords Geology and the Fossil RecordBy the beginning of the 19th Century, two lines of geological evidence were converging that were ultimately crucial for helping to establish the scientific basis of organic evolution. One was that the earth is extremely old, and the other was the recognition that fossils are the remains of extinct animals and plants [1].1 At the 1 Fossils are created in sedimentary rock when minerals slowly replace the organic matter that comprise and animal or plant.

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Section: Jean Baptiste De Monet Lamarckmentioning

confidence: 99%

19th Century Evolutionary Thought Before Charles Darwin

Flannelly¹

2017

Religious Beliefs, Evolutionary Psychiatry, and Mental Health in America

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“…Interest in the effect of scientific discoveries on society can be traced back to the beginnings of the modern sciences (Gillespie 2004, Gissis 2009, Merton 1938. For reasons of legitimizing science alone, this question was not only of interest to early scientists.…”

Section: Historical Rootsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How does knowledge relate to political action?

Stehr¹,

Grundmann²

2012

Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research

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In this paper we investigate the relation between knowledge and political action, focusing on knowledge claims stemming from science that at the same time have relevance in a policy context. In so doing, we will revisit some well-known and some lesser known approaches, such as C.P. Snow's thesis of the two cultures and Mannheim's conceptualization of theory and practice. We arrive at a distinction between knowledge for practice and practical knowledge, which we briefly apply to the case of climate change science and policy. We state as our thesis that policy is ever more reliant on knowledge, but science can deliver ever less certainty. Political decisions and programs have to recognize this fact, either implicitly or explicitly. This creates a paradox that is normally resolved through the political decision and not the dissemination of ''truth'' in the sense of uncontested knowledge. We use the case of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as an example.

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“…It is rather a concept which plays a series of roles -sometimes overt, sometimes masked -throughout the history of biology, and frequently in very 'valuative' or normative ways, also shifting between the biological and the social (Canguilhem, 2002, Gissis, 2009). Indeed, it has often been presented as a key-concept in life science and the 'theorization' of Life (for instance, in the sense that biology is a science of organisms or is nothing; Grene and Depew, 2004).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Namely, one author will use the organism concept to give metaphysical grounding to an empirical claim (for example, Kant insists that in organisms the "idea of a whole" is present as a "principle of knowledge" [Kant, 1790, § 65], which is not an empirical feature but a "condition of our understanding of organs and traits as parts of a single organism" [Huneman 2014;Kant, 1790, § 77]) 6 , while another author will insist that it is purely empirical -not to mention further instances of hybridity between the biological and the social (e.g. Lamarck as discussed in Gissis, 2009), the biological and the neuropsychological, and so on.…”

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confidence: 99%

The organism as ontological go-between: Hybridity, boundaries and degrees of reality in its conceptual history

Wolfe

2014

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in

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The organism is neither a discovery like the circulation of the blood or the glycogenic function of the liver, nor a particular biological theory like epigenesis or preformationism. It is rather a concept which plays a series of roles -sometimes overt, sometimes masked -throughout the history of biology, and frequently in very normative ways, also shifting between the biological and the social. Indeed, it has often been presented as a key-concept in life science and the 'theorization' of Life, but conversely has also been the target of influential rejections: as just an instrument of transmission for the selfish gene, but also, historiographically, as part of an outdated 'vitalism'. Indeed, the organism, perhaps because it is experientially closer to the 'body' than to the 'molecule', is often the object of quasi-affective theoretical investments presenting it as essential, sometimes even as the pivot of a science or a particular approach to nature, while other approaches reject or attack it with equal force, assimilating it to a mysterious 'vitalist' ontology of extra-causal forces, or other pseudo-scientific doctrines. This paper does not seek to adjudicate between these debates, either in terms of scientific validity or historical coherence; nor does it return to the well-studied issue of the organism-mechanism tension in biology. Recent scholarship has begun to focus on the emergence and transformation of the concept of organism, but has not emphasized so much the way in which organism is a shifting, 'go-between' concept -invoked as 'natural' by some thinkers to justify their metaphysics, but then presented as value-laden by others, over and against the natural world. The organism as go-between concept is also a hybrid, a boundary concept or an epistemic limit case, all of which partly overlap with the idea of 'nomadic concepts'. Thereby the concept of organism continues to function in different contexts -as a heuristic, an explanatory challenge, 2 a model of order, of regulation, etc. -despite having frequently been pronounced irrelevant and reduced to molecules or genes. Yet this perpetuation is far removed from any 'metaphysics of organism', or organismic biology.

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Interactions Between Social and Biological Thinking: The Case of Lamarck

Cited by 7 publications

References 18 publications

19th Century Evolutionary Thought Before Charles Darwin

19th Century Evolutionary Thought Before Charles Darwin

How does knowledge relate to political action?

The organism as ontological go-between: Hybridity, boundaries and degrees of reality in its conceptual history

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